First Gym Workout

Only five people showed up for this practice.

The workout was as follows:
- Max pullups in 10 minutes
- Back-extensions
- Inclined situps
- Woodchopper
- Roman chair

To warm up, we spun for 5 minutes. The workout was exhausting, but was also quite refreshing since it was different from the usual track workouts we would do.

Final Water Practice Before College Cup

With one more week until the long-awaited College Cup Dragonboat competition at Lake Merced in San Francisco, practice maintained its usual intensity. We paddled almost nonstop for the 1.5 hours worth of practice, only resting about a total of fifteen minutes for stretches, technique instructions, and feedback. 

We did four race pieces, each lasting about 3 minutes or so. In comparison to the past few practices, our speed and mesh have improved. However, there were still many technicalities and little habits that needed to be tweaked a bit. The biggest thing that Coach noticed was not enough rotation, bury, and off-times happening once in a while throughout the race. For three out of the four race pieces, we raced with Lightwave to our side. Although they had a stronger start, body, and finish, we were not super far behind them. Hopefully, this will be enough to get a good placement for next week. 

Today, we also worked a bit more on power (and inherently, timing). For power, Coach emphasized hitting the water at the same time. The entire team must first be able to apply the power to moving the boat forward simultaneously. By using the hit drill, we practiced entering and pulling the water at the same time, but at a more controlled rate. After, we did the push-pull drill to practice utilizing the rest of our muscles to push the boat forward. Lastly, we did a power-ten drill where everyone continues paddling, but we went through row by row to do a power ten. The goal of this exercise was to enable individual portions of the boat to apply power without inadvertently rating up. 

To end practice, we had some blending pieces and section pieces. Blending pieces were times when we mixed the groups of people paddling. Typically we would do either back/front half, left/right of back/front, sometimes odd/even of different rows too. You can really get creative with this. 

Just Ten Minutes of Hard Work

The track was doused by rain shortly before practice started. Today, we had the lowest attendance of all practices (12 paddlers). Hopefully, it was not the weather that discouraged the team, but because most of them had other obligations to tend to. The cold really hit Stanford, as we all practiced in 50º temperature. 

We jogged two laps to warm-up. 

The main workout today was around strength and some cardio. 

Everyone paired up to do the following workout twice. 

1 min - max pushups

1 min - max situps

1 min - max burpies

2 mins - max shuttle runs

Stairs, Sprints, and Some Strength

Today's land practice consisted of a lot of running and some strength training.
After two laps of warm-up and stretching, we were divided into three groups to run stairs.
Up and down, up and down.
About three minutes in, we had to sprint a 400m and returned to stairs again.
After 20 minutes worth of stairs, the entire team had to run Indian runs around the track twice.

To end the workout, we had to do wheelbarrow, piggy back carry, and baby carry for strength training. We also had a short core workout before ending at 9 on the dot.